Health and Safety – Emily Witt

[Pantheon; 2024]

Bloomberg-era rezonings transformed New York City’s skyline and streetscape into a glass-and-steel jungle of luxury high-rises and pristine POPS (privately-owned public spaces) where office workers could scarf $14 salads. The legacy of these 2000s changes is most visible in a handful of neighborhoods. In Long Island City and Williamsburg, a handful of lovably scuzzy DIY music venues were demolished to make room for generic luxury condos, and any vestige of a once-thriving arts scene has long since been co-opted by dime-a-dozen influencers and brand “activations.” Gowanus, home to a canal so polluted it was designated a federal superfund site in 2010, is slated to receive an estimated 20,000 new residents once ambitious housing developments are fully realized.

Rezonings are a way to encourage more real estate development, a crucial tool for creating new housing stock in a city whose borders are mostly water. But building from scratch isn’t cheap, and those costs are reflected in higher rent. And so neighborhoods change in response to this sudden influx of residents, many of whom are considerably wealthier than their more established neighbors. I grew up in Flushing, a neighborhood that always felt to me like a Queens backwater until it was suddenly a foodie destination, with tourists from other boroughs and beyond suddenly pouring off the 7 train for dumpling tours and dim sum. Flushing has since also been rezoned, and every time I visit (now I’m the one schlepping in from Brooklyn for dim sum) the new buildings are a little taller, the glass windows a little shinier, the environment a little more, as the developers might say, revitalized.

At the outset of Emily Witt’s newest book, Health and Safety, the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Bushwick, with its proliferation of trendy coffee shops, vintage clothing stores, and murals, was still (mostly) affordable. Framed as a memoir of sorts, Witt, a staff writer at the New Yorker, focuses on a turbulent six-year period beginning in 2016. The book spans Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, violent protests and counter-protests against racism and police brutality, and the Parkland shooting, all of which she covered for the magazine, as well as the onset of the pandemic and the dissolution of her long-term relationship. The backdrop of this political and moral confusion is Bushwick, where Witt lives alone and later with her partner, referred to as Andrew. Witt, originally from Minneapolis, finds solace in Bushwick’s elevated train tracks and bountiful bodegas and, above all, in its thriving underground techno scene. Techno forms the book’s true motherbeat, and its insistent presence throughout the book is amplified by the many drugs she consumes in the warehouses, clubs, and bars that the blocked rezoning didn’t have a chance to displace or destroy.

A largely Latino and working-class neighborhood, Bushwick is not a place where wealthy white families go to raise children (they go to Park Slope or Greenpoint, notes Witt with some disdain). Instead, Bushwick is where she found “others who shared my own nebulous desire for refusal, whatever that was.” A freelance journalist unshackled from a nine-to-five schedule and normie responsibilities, Witt immersed herself fully in the scene, giving talks about ayahuasca and attending invite-only festivals in the woods. She learned to dose herself with the precision of a chemist, ensuring that her pharmaceutical highs peaked in tandem with the energy on the dance floor.

Witt writes about drugs with the confidence of someone whose dalliances have led to few major ramifications—personal, professional, legal, or otherwise. After seven years on Wellbutrin, which primarily served to affirm her love of stimulants, the decision to stop taking it had a sort of reverse-gateway drug effect. No longer worried about adverse interactions, she threw herself into altered states of consciousness with intellectual gusto. As such, she’s acquired considerable expertise, much of it undeniably interesting; after all, Witt’s account is probably the closest that many readers will get to handing a stranger an envelope of cash to facilitate attendance at an ayahuasca ceremony. But eventually, the detailed descriptions—feminine entities shuddering through the body, the timing of a successful candyflip or the exact amount of acid to “enhance my surroundings but not get stupid”—can veer into the tedious. It turns out that when one is sober, reading about the deeply personal experience of someone else’s drug-fueled epiphany is not unlike watching the latest CGI-drenched superhero movie. You can sense that it’s supposed to be exciting, but in both cases, the more likely end result is stultifying anticlimax.

Like Witt, I took solace in techno when the covid shutdown hit New York City in March 2020. Never much of a raver before that year, I would wake up and put on an impossibly long playlist—my go-to, assembled by the Belfast duo known as Bicep, clocks in at 140 hours—and let it run on shuffle mode in a continuous flow until it was time for bed. Time was already blurry, and without the structure of a commute or a gym routine, sometimes it felt like my only anchor was a drum machine’s insistent 4/4 beat. My partying kicked up significantly, except, instead of going to bars or clubs, I danced at home with my pandemic pod of roommates and significant others. Liquor stores were considered essential businesses, and lines stretched around the corner of our local discount emporium. Especially in the earliest days of lockdown, there didn’t seem to be anything else to spend money on. I was never as serious as Witt, though, and I’ll never be an insider. I’ve always had nine-to-five jobs, so I skip the afters and try to salvage my sleep schedule. I prefer shows during long weekends so I can maximize recovery time, and prioritize venues that don’t look like obvious fire hazards. The world has since re-opened, but I still find that the only shows that interest me are techno and jazz—music without words. It’s a holdover from those early terrifying months, when language felt largely pointless in the face of nature.

In Health and Safety, raving forms the bedrock of Witt’s relationship with Andrew, a software engineer/house music producer. But their dynamic is alarming from the start, marred by miscommunication and a mutual unwillingness to fully commit. More deep-seated tensions arise, including arguments over Andrew’s habit of staying out all night. Meanwhile, Witt’s internalized misogyny (her unpleasant or uncool traits are invariably “coded as female”) seem to preclude all but the most cursory attempts at meaningful communication. Both struggle with the ethics of Witt’s profession: Andrew castigates her for sheltering behind the “illusion of journalistic objectivity,” seemingly at the expense of her subjects, while Witt admits that she doesn’t know how else to be in the world.

The couple’s conflict is exacerbated by Witt’s travel schedule, which intensifies as the book progresses and she’s sent on assignment to cover the endless stream of social, political, and moral debasements that mark the Trump presidency. But for all her time on the road, Witt conveys less of an insightful travelogue and more of a by-the-numbers catalog of opinions designed to enrage coastal liberals. Perhaps she saved analysis for the articles she filed.

This is a recurring theme, however: an absence of introspection at moments when it seems most warranted. Witt is certainly capable of self-evisceration, but primarily uses moments of reflection to gesture towards awareness of a problem or pattern, stopping short of meaningful attempts to address it. For example, after describing in detail her “middle class entry points” into drug use, including ayahuasca trips and a New Age book collection, she acknowledges what readers were already thinking: “I was the one being an asshole, with my smug little adventures in cultural appropriation that I used to process my banal emotions.” Witt’s realization doesn’t stop her from doing ayahuasca again; instead, she rebrands her drug use strictly as an extension of her partying: all stimulation, no introspection. In doing so, she effectively pardons herself from addressing any uncomfortable realizations that may arise.

In 2019, while reporting for the New Yorker, Witt decides she wants to have a baby with Andrew: “the state of the world wouldn’t matter if I had him and we had a child to pour our love into together.” This seemingly momentous decision is something she expresses ambivalence about elsewhere in the book, viewing her non-monogamous relationship with Andrew as a rebuke to heteronormative family-making. Meanwhile, Andrew is unequivocal about not wanting children, a stance that Witt views, somewhat troublingly, as “daring me to leave.” In recent years, enough books have been released about this topic to constitute their own genre: authors such as Jenny Offill, Rachel Cusk, and Maggie Nelson have all grappled with the personal and moral implications of bringing a child into a violent, warming world. Witt, whose decision was surely informed by her firsthand experiences reporting on climate change, school shootings, and the rise of fascism, instead sidesteps these discussions altogether. Witt makes a decision, but the route by which she arrives at it—one of the central decisions of cis womanhood—is so shrouded that one wonders why it was even mentioned.

But the omissions I find far more concerning relate to Health and Safety’s final act, which treats the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement and a particular protest in the Bronx, during which the NYPD acted so egregiously that the city later agreed to pay $21,500 to each person arrested that night. One such person was Andrew, who attended at Witt’s behest. When the police descended, the two were separated. Andrew had heeded a call for “white allies to the front” and was arrested, while she was let go without incident after flashing her press badge. The incident triggers in Andrew what seems to be a prolonged manic episode, and their relationship implodes as his behavior becomes increasingly erratic.

I don’t take issue with Witt’s retelling of the breakup; insofar as the entire book is an exercise in making sense of extraordinary circumstances, she is clearly processing something that only two people will ever have a claim to understanding. But having read what she has decided to share earlier in the book, some of Andrew’s criticisms appear valid, or at least worthy of further inquiry. When he taunts her for “hid[ing] behind journalistic objectivity so you don’t have to take a stance” and “flash[ing] your press card while Black people get beaten in front of you”, it’s hard not to see certain kernels of truth underneath these lines, however over-simplistic they may be.

Back in 2016, Witt agreed to write a book about the Nigerian movie industry, an assignment she knew nothing about and readily admits to accepting solely because she needed the money. She spent five weeks in Lagos, interviewing directors and acknowledging that she was “working from the discredited subject position of a white person writing about a West African country.” Witt’s resulting book, Nollywood, was published in 2017 and never mentioned again in Health and Safety. I kept waiting for it to come up, perhaps in response to Andrew’s accusation of exploiting Black subjects for journalistic ends. This elision was disappointing, and further evidence that Witt seems more comfortable identifying a pattern than interrogating the meaning behind its recurrences. In two separate instances—one during a peyote ceremony, the other at a club in Berlin—she expresses discomfort about “invading a space in which I didn’t belong.” In both passages, she describes the feeling with that exact phrase, and both times she swallows the feeling, either by waiting out the lackluster ceremony or finding somewhere else to dance. One could read her time in Nigeria and even her participation in the BLM protest as an extension of this urge to insert herself, another example of being somewhere she knows she doesn’t belong but declines to immediately leave.

In the 1960s, “dropping out” (as in, dropping acid) was a well-known middle finger to the establishment, but Witt acknowledges that, throughout the Trump years, her Fatboy Slim–approved lifestyle of eat, sleep, rave, repeat was in no way a “politics of resistance.” Instead, she highlights with clinical detachment the ways in which a scene, like a relationship, can become so comfortably obliterating that it takes something seismic—a global pandemic, or maybe a neighborhood rezoning—to shake us from its grip. Alone for the first time in a while, Witt was forced to “convince myself of the integrity of my politics, which I was incapable of doing, because of course I was culpable.” Far more than the descriptions of LSD trips or blissed-out warehouse parties, I find this the most brutally honest line in the book. Health and Safety is an unsparing portrait of the coping mechanisms we create in late stage capitalism. The hopelessness that prompted Witt to spend the early Trump years reading about the rise of fascism in Europe is at least partially fueled by the awareness that personal culpability is, like surveillance, inescapable. Witt’s vulnerability in this moment of personal reckoning makes it clear that this book was written not so much for other ravers or journalists or even heartbroken women staring down “middle aged solitude,” but entirely for herself.

Selina Lee lives in Brooklyn and spends her time reading, rock climbing, and listening to Carly Rae Jepsen. You can find her film criticism at InReviewOnline.com.